Black people officially won the unrestricted right to vote in the US in 1965 but many still encountered hurdles on their path to the ballot box: 11 states in the south quickly introduced a poll tax requiring an annual fee to be allowed to vote. The practice unambiguously targeted poor Black communities in an early form of thinly veiled racist voter suppression. Vernon Dahmer wouldn’t stand for it. In January 1966 the Hattiesburg, Mississippi-based Black activist and NAACP chapter head promised to cover the fee for those struggling to afford it. “It’s a proclamation that we here, that we matter,” he says in an early scene in By Any Means, a considered, if blunt, drama inspired by the real-life aftermath of Dahmer’s murder by the Ku Klux Klan.
It is Mississippi in the mid-60s and Wayne Strider (a sturdy Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is new to the local FBI unit, having recently moved back to his home state from Chicago, and is dealing with bosses who turn a blind eye to racist crimes. “White guys can get away with murder,” says one Black colleague while shaking his head. After his boss receives a message from President Johnson to prioritize the Dahmer murder case, Strider is teamed up with a widely feared mobster, Gregory Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg with a rather distracting prosthetic nose), who has been shipped in from Brooklyn as part of an off-book mission to track down the Klansmen and bring justice to the killers.
By Any Means is loosely based on historical events: the Scarpa character is real but Strider is a composite of multiple local FBI agents that he worked with (the agency has never clarified the names or acknowledged that they worked with Scarpa). There’s initially a boisterous likability to the unlikely pair, at least when Scarpa isn’t inviting Strider to watch his hook-ups at a crummy motel, and the actors’ banter provides the film with a few welcome moments of comic relief amid an onslaught of violence as Wahlberg’s character encourages the initially buttoned-up Strider to take justice into his own hands and he educates the mafioso about what it means to call someone a “cracker” (“Salty, no flavor,” the agent explains).
Director Elegance Bratton brings a visual flair to By Any Means that is a welcome change from the sludgy palette of his previous feature, the gay military drama The Inspection. Mississippi has rarely looked so lush, kissed with the sun and saturated with color, with thoughtfully designed home interiors that give richness to the world. Yet there is also an overreliance on an emotive score (the original song over the credits is written by queen of schmaltz Diane Warren) and a tendency to overexplain the film’s themes: an establishing shot to a Klan meeting shows a man entering a door reading “whites only” later shows it again in closeup, in case we missed it the first time. Other choices are downright odd, such as when the film abruptly switches to a first person shooter style à la Call of Duty for little discernible reason; you often find yourself wishing for less machismo and rather more of, say, Nicole Beharie, underused as Strider’s wife and local community leader.
It’s no debate that better movies are made when film-makers look at the ugliness of American history with clear eyes. (While director Kathryn Bigelow has faced criticism for depictions of torture in her films, others such as Jafar Panahi have proved that showing the echoes of its trauma can be more effective.) Audiences may find Bratton’s vision particularly hard to endure: early on in the film Dahmer is shown engulfed in flames, filmed unflinchingly by Britton’s static camera as he burns to death after his home is firebombed by the Klan. Torture scenes include blood, baseball bats to the kneecaps, pistol-whipping and the threat of sexual assault. Racist abuse hurled at black characters ranges from spiteful slurs to sickening taunts about lynching. As if her husband’s death scene wasn’t enough, Dahmer’s elderly, defenceless wife is next in line for the Klan. Here Bratton breaks from history for dramatic effect: the real Ellie Dahmer has lived a rich life of activism and celebrated her 101st birthday this year. (Dahmer’s youngest son has called for a boycott of the film, describing it as “mostly fiction” and pushing “white hero savior” tropes.)
Bratton aims to both expose and underline the racism that the US was built on by embellishing history with his own imagination. “I’m not interested in a prescriptive historical take,” the director said in a recent interview. “My film is not history. My film is using history in a way to comment on the contemporary condition.” The result is grimly effective while also being one of the most grisly and upsetting films in recent memory. As a provocation, By All Means is hard to forget.
By Any Means is out in Australia now and in the US on 4 September with a UK release to follow
